Thoughts
Notes on software engineering, distributed systems, and the future of human productivity.
The Bots That Almost Match
Exact-match blocklists are blind to a bot farm that mutates its fingerprint by one field per request. This is how MinHash and locality-sensitive hashing turn "have I seen this exact client" into "have I seen something shaped like this", and catch the farm in sublinear time.
How a Website Decides You're a Bot
A defender's-eye tour of how modern anti-bot systems actually work in 2026, from passive TLS and HTTP fingerprints to an obfuscated client that probes your browser, server-side ML scoring, and tokens that expire in seconds. Plus an honest split of what a small team can build and what it has to rent.